


small mercies

by forpeaches (bluecarrot)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/M, Idiots in Love, Marriage Proposal, Sad and Happy, Short One Shot, brienne has no self-esteem, neither does the author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:27:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25182481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluecarrot/pseuds/forpeaches
Summary: There are little mercies everywhere.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 33
Kudos: 256





	small mercies

**Author's Note:**

> written 09 may - 09 july 2020

There are little mercies everywhere. Jaime is alive, spared by the Bloody Mummers and the fever and the stream, where she tried to drown him; that is one. 

Brienne herself is alive — that is two — and Hoat half-believes the lie about sapphires— that is three, and she’ll count it as a fourth blessing as well, she is so grateful.

Jaime’s hair is in his eyes. She wishes she could push it clear.

“You should have let me die,” he says to her — she thinks he is speaking to her, although he might as well be talking to the fire or the Mummers or the gods themselves. “I should have died,” he says, and drifts into sleep.

Brienne fed him water and bread to keep him alive. She washed mud and vomit and shit off his body to keep him alive. She fought his fever and his anger and his fear, called him a spineless coward with no knowledge of the real world.

She watches him now and wonders, not for the first time, if she would be so brave without her swordhand.

Jaime tosses her in a cell at Kings Landing and forgets about her for a week. 

All things considered, it seems fair. 

And Brienne has a long time to consider.

He drags her out and lets her go and she loses track of him for a while, as she loses track of herself. The days drag on and there is nothing to do except the next thing to be done, and the next thing to be done, and the next: and is her whole life to pass thus?  She’d thought being a knight would be more exciting. But this sort of adventure only looks good in hindsight, maybe, and in songs. 

And she isn’t a knight anyway.

Jaime looks harder now; even from a distance he looks harder. Older. It is not only the weight of the golden hand; it’s a layer of resignation he never had before.

She’d like to shake him. _Fight back._

_ What for? _

_ Revenge. _

He turns and sees her across the field and he’s scowling but oh, she smiles, she can’t help it. Something about him —

Not a bell ringing, thinks Brienne, puzzling as she hones her sword with long, careful strokes down its length. Not a bell, although it’s something like that. Not like drinking water when she is thirsty, nor falling in a feather-bed after a hard day’s ride. Not laughing, not warmth, not her father’s arms around her shoulders: it is none of this and somehow like all of it.

Jaime invites her to practice and Brienne finds a new sort of grief. 

He has lost most of his skill along with his hand, and what remains is tangled up footwork, all the wrong responses; they leave his side open for disembowling. 

She strikes him again and again with the flat of the dull, heavy practice blade. He must be a patchwork of bruises, but they only stop when she says so.

Jaime’s breathing hard and sweating. “A right mess,” he says to her.

“You will learn.”

“I’ll never be what I was.”

“Perhaps not,” she says, not really paying attention. What _is_ that feeling? She presses a hand to her chest. It’s right there in her sternum —

“You look pale.”

“I am well.”

He places his hand on her chest — a little above her own. “Your heart is going like mad.”

As it might, with him so near.

“It’s the exercise,” she says.

Her traitorous heart gives a leap when she sees him, and that has nothing at all to do with exercise. Her hands sweat in her gloves, her breath catches, her legs shake and — oh.  Her knees want to fall open.

He says: “You look warm.”

“It — I am well,” she says. She is warm. Hot. Humiliated, and about as sensible as a rutting beast in the field.

Jaime looks unguarded. “Do you need help with something? I am not as capable as --”

“No.”

“Even your protest is underfed. Sit down awhile. Let me—”

He isn’t touching her, he never touches her, but she pulls away like he’s taken hold. “Alright, that’s enough. I don’t know what you’re playing at. You’ve never spoken this many words to me without an insult buried in them. Not once.”

“Would you _rather_ I insult you?”

“No!”

The hard look is back to his face, and her knees aren’t trembling anymore. 

“Good,” he says. 

“Good,” she says. 

She lays in the dark and closes her eyes and wants him.

What does it means to live without the thing that makes life worthwhile? If she’d give her own hand to bring his back, does it mean there is something more valuable than being whole?

He lives because she told him to live. Doesn’t that make her responsible for him, in some blurred way?

No, she says to the pressure in her chest that says _Yes_.  I have nothing to do with Lannisters.

_No_ , she says to her hand, when she goes by his door and pauses and wants to knock. He doesn’t want you. He isn’t yours to want.

Those two things are not the same, and only one of them might be true.

She lays in the dark and wishes her hand were his.

Little mercies: she lives through the battle. Blood-stained, bone-weary, bruised and cut in too many places to notice except to feel it as one great ache, — she still can feel the different pain of searching the living and not finding Jaime.

“Have you seen—?” she asks a dozen people, who have not seen, who are looking for their own dead. Their sorrows are worse than hers, they have the right to grieve: but she has the grief of not having the right to do it.

She sews wounds, binds broken limbs, washes off blood from a hundred faces that aren’t his. Every blonde-haired man is a silent bargain. If he is alive, I will tell him. I will not be a coward any longer. He may jape and scorn and I will tell him, I will say — 

“Put this in between your teeth,” she says. “We need to set the leg.”

The man passes out, which makes it easier.

There are no more wounded and there is still no Jaime, and for the first time in her life Brienne understands the urge to drink more wine than she needs to wet her throat.

Back to her room now, where she can weep in peace. Her eyes are heavy with sleep and more. 

Mercy: someone has drawn her a bath. It is so much work for a luxury, she can’t believe it. Who would think of it? Who would think of her?  Gods, the water is still warm. 

She begins to strip where she stands, not caring that the clothes need to be laundered, tended. She has done enough tending for one day — one whole life. She only wants —

“Brienne.”

She whirls around, holding her tunic against her chest like it’s armor. Stupid, she must look stupid, half-naked and on the edge of tears — ugly overgrown manly — she has to speak or she will cry and kiss him. “You’re alive,” she says, stupidly. Dolt. Idiot. _Slowminded beast_.

“So are you,” he says, and smiles a bit.

“Are you hurt — wounded? We couldn’t find you below —”

“I wanted some quiet.”

In her chambers. Well, it isn’t as if anyone would look for the Kingslayer — or any other man — in the rooms of Brienne the Beauty. “You are hurt,” she says, seeing it, and thank the gods he’s hurt because now she has the excuse to touch him. 

“Not badly. Brienne—”

“This one needs stitches, at least. You don’t want an infection.” It’s on his right side, above the empty wrist: just a slash from someone’s sword, but a long one. She fusses at it, holding the edges together. 

“Yes,” he says. “Wouldn’t want to lose the hand.”

“No.”

“Brienne,” he says again, and another time, because she still won’t look at him — _“Brienne.”_

_“_ You lived,” she says. “I thought you’d died.” I thought the gods had let me out of my promise.

“I told you I would.”

“Did you?” He is so close by. Distractingly close. She can’t think with him so near.  She steps back. “Did you — the bath — I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go. I’ll find something to sew your arm. Bandages.”

“In your shift?” says Jaime: and Brienne blushes red. He laughs at her. “I’ve seen more of you than that.”

She pulls the tunic over her head, covering herself a bit. “This is different.”

“It is. For example, last time I was more injured. And in a fever. And —”

“I love you,” she says. 

Jaime stares. 

For once, she has caught him out dumb. He blinks, swallows, doesn’t respond.

She takes a deep breath. “I know what I must look like —”

“You don’t have any idea of what you look like.”

— barefoot and bonetired, bloody to the tips of her hair with other people’s misery; she’s half mud and the other half tears. She hasn’t eaten in two days nor slept in as much, and she thought Jaime was dead so what does any of that matter?

“I don’t need you to mock me, ser. I know we’re — unequal. I know it. It doesn’t matter. I love you, and I want to be with you in whatever way you’ll have me, and I am perfectly aware that this conversation must be nearly as painful to you as it is to me, so if will do me the great mercy of leaving, I will now drown myself in my bath.”

He makes a frustrated gesture. “Brienne, you idiot."

“I know that I’m a fool —“

“I don’t want you to drown. I want you to marry me.”

That is so cruel that she very nearly does weep. “Ser, you are unkind.”

“Then let me take you to bed.”

Even harder to believe. He might wed her — for money, for place, for family and honor — but not for lust.  She shakes her head.

Jaime lets out a long, shuddering sigh. “Then come with me, and sew up this arm, and we will go together to find something to eat.”

Prosaic practicality: that’s more reasonable. Although Jaime being reasonable sends her into a flurry again. “And — and then what? What do we do after we’re fed?”

“Then I’ll ask you again,” he says.

To marry him. To bed him. Impossible. But she feels a smile tug at her mouth. “I’ll tell you no.”

“And I’ll ask you again. Brienne, you stubborn beast, come _on_ —”

**Author's Note:**

> excerpt that didn’t make it in the story, because the story changed:
> 
> *
> 
> “What would you have done if I asked to marry you?”  
> “You mean, after laughing in your face?”  
> They are in bed, entwined. Jaime is sleepy and beautiful and lazy, as a cat will be after satisfaction. But he frowns: “Why would you laugh?”  
> “Why would you ask me?” she counters.  
> “Would you really refuse?”  
> “Jaime. You have not asked.”  
> He props himself up on his elbow. “I didn’t think it was a conversation we needed to have.”  
> “You mean that you were able fo get me into bed without it.”  
> “I mean,” he says, “I thought we agreed that we would.”  
> “How can we agree on something that we haven’t spoken about?” she counters.  
> Jaime lets his head fall back on the pillows. “I give up —“


End file.
